Catalog

Mnemosyne Mother of Muses

A mirrored form in counter-movement, dense with emotion-charged memory - a rapidly sparking dynamism of image and afterimage, swirling resonant words/music, juxtaposing loss, my father's stroke, Toscanini, Siodmak's The Killers, the Red Robin Diner. ... I seem to be quickening.

"There is a double retrograde motion. A flow of images goes forward, linked to a sound track that is going backward. Then the directions are reversed. This relates to the complex canon forms and retrograde motions that were beloved of some Western Renaissance composers as well as Schoenberg and Webern. I was influenced by a passage in Heidegger where he calls attention to the ancient Greeks conceiving Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, as the mother of the muses. Memory is both a subject of the film and an essential part of its structure. The material evokes many other emotional and philosophical ideas. Images include those from a wedding, the Red Robin Diner at night, my father after his stroke, the place in Sunnyside where I grew up, a ruined factory on the shore in Eastport Maine. Sound elements include the conductor Arturo Toscanini rehearsing a passage from Wagner, something from the sound track of the film noir THE KILLERS. There is a sense of loss and recovery-- the need to go back and its impossibility except in art." (Larry Gottheim)